The weather was nice and I went to buy an ice cream around the corner from the Albert Cuyp market. In front of me stood a mother with a daughter of about six years old. The mother was young, beautiful and unnecessarily frisky. She made skipping jumps that fluttered her long blond hair, and every time she squatted vitally to say something to her child in a happy, loud voice. She smiled an exaggerated amount of white teeth.
The girl was cut from a completely different cloth. With large, penetrating eyes in a pale face, she silently looked at the ice buckets. “Look, Evi!” her mother yelled. “They also have rosemary ice cream. That sounds so good to me!’ (I regularly see women there claiming that rosemary ice cream looks ‘so good’ to them, but they always end up with something else.)
The girl muttered something, the mother holding her ear theatrically. ‘Chocolate?’ she asked. The child nodded and fumbled at the hem of her dress. The mother ordered a cone of chocolate and then let her doubts out loud. ‘Oh dear, I can’t choose, should I have the blood orange or the elderberries, or the caramel walnut or the strawberry cheesecakeor uh ..’ The ice-scooping teenager on duty waited patiently until she finally opted for pistachio.
Again she sank to her knees to hand her daughter a cone with a clownish brusqueness that made the child recoil. ‘Tadaa!’ people crowed in abundance. (“They had to drive a burning doll pram into your cunt work, I would have thought at the time, but for God knows what cowardly reasons I didn’t say.” So Gerard Reve).
The child licked gently. “Let’s have a taste, Evi?” said the mother. She yanked the cone from her hand and took a much too big bite. The child looked gloomily at her battered ice cream cone.
“Ooooh, Evi!” the mother cheered. “Look, a hopscotch!” She dragged the child across the street, where indeed a hopscotch track had been painted on the tiles. And sure enough, there she started hopping madly. The girl watched with Oskarchen’s wide-open fearful eyes that Blechtrommel†
“Come on Evi!” screamed the mother. Depressed, the girl shuffled closer. The mother jumped up to her, picked her up and dropped her onto the hopscotch track. She looked around anxiously, her ice cream cone horribly crooked in her hand.
I ran away. Yes, that ice cream was going to fall, and no, I didn’t want to be there. There is already enough misery.